Lisa Guenther, "On Pain of Death: A Critical Phenomenology of Lethal Injection" (lunch workshop)

Lisa Guenther is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbit University and the author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives (Minnesota University Press, 2013) as well as numerous articles in contempoary political theory.

"On Pain of Death: A Critical Phenomenology of Lethal Injection"

Lunch/workshop, Thursday, Feb. 5, 12:30-2:00, Cone 210

Due to limited seating, please RSVP here by Friday, Jan 30.

Abstract: The United States is the only Western democratic nation to practice capital punishment in the 21st century. Lethal injection was introduced in the late 1970s as a humane alternative to evidently brutal methods of execution such as electrocution, hanging, and firing squads. This paper examines the “staging” of lethal injection as a medical procedure in which the inmate/patient is put to sleep – and put to death – on a gurney, hooked up to an IV machine, sometimes with the direct participation of medical professionals such as anesthesiologists.  This medicalization of capital punishment introduces an ambiguity of care and punishment that haunts both the practice of state killing and also the mandate of medicine to support life rather than destroying it. A methodological framework of critical phenomenology is used to analyze both the appearance of a painless execution and also the social, political, and legal motivation to produce such an appearance.  Special emphasis is given to the “consciousness check” whereby the executioner is required to bring his own body into an intimate relation of empathy with the body of the condemned, reading his gestures for signs of awareness, before allowing the execution to continue.

Cosponsored by the Chancellors Diversity Challenge Fund